Beowulf: A Verse Translation into Modern English

132 Pages·1967·3.91 MB·English

by  Edwin Morgan

BEOWULF

BEOWULF
A VERSE TRANSLATION
INTO MODERN
ENGLISH
BY
EDWIN MORGAN
1967
UNIVERSITY OE CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY AND LOS ANOELES
To Ritchie Girvan
with respect and affection
University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles
Cambridge University Press, London, England
Copyright by Edwin Morgan 1952
Cloth edition originally published in 1952 by
The Hand and Flower Press, now of Lympne, Hythe, Kent
Fifth printing, 1967
Printed by offset in the United States of America
INTRODUCTION
I. THE TRANSLATOR’S TASK IN BEOWULF
Rifling by chance some old book-tumulus
And bringing into light those iron-tempered
Lines oj its buried verse—never be careless
With ancient but still formidable weapons!
Mayakovsky.
What literary activity is more purposeful than trans­
lation? And yet, what field is more thickly cluttered
with the mere monuments of industry—dry, torpid,
and unread! And especially in poetry, what translator
has not sometimes felt, with Ezra Pound, that ‘all
translation is a thankless, or is at least most apt to
be a thankless and desolate undertaking'?—thankless,
because his audience in the first place almost disbelieves
in the translation of poetry even as a possibility;
desolate, because of the disproportion between his own
convictlike labour and the infinitesimal influence on
men’s minds of the completed product. Nevertheless
apologies are not offered for continuing to attempt
verse translation. If poetry has no ulterior motives, the
translation of it has, and it is the translator’s utilitarian
zeal that keeps this difficult redoubt from falling
entirely into the hands of its two enemies, happy ignor­
ance on one side and long-term esperantism on the
other. When the translator unites with this purpose­
fulness something that was pre-existent in his mind, a
secret and passionate sympathy with the alien poet—
Dryden and Juvenal, FitzGerald and Omar, Pound and
Rihaku, Chapman and Homer, Mathers and Bilhana,
Douglas and Virgil—then we may have something
memorable, some justification of the activity. The final
demand to see propagandist ardour and innate poetic
sympathy linked with the care of accuracy—and this
is a demand which most critics of translation uncon­
sciously make—is never met in practice, and some
translators would indeed argue that any such attempts
must be self-contradictory and futile. It is only too
easy to stress a ‘natural’ opposition between poet and
scholar, since there are plenty of examples to snow that
it has existed. Keats’s famous sonnet on Chapman’s
Homer will not seem too strange to anyone who takes
the trouble to read that translation as poetry; yet
Matthew Arnold, examining the latter piecemeal with
a scholarly eye, was able with honesty to pronounce it
fanciful, extravagant, oblique, and oversophisticated:
‘Keats could not read the original, and therefore could
not really judge the translation.’ The point is still,
however: could Arnold? And that question remains
with us after we read Arnold’s own specimen transla­
tions from Homer; because these have fidelity without
vigour, and if Chapman has vigour without fidelity it
is not hard to see whose version will be read, and being
read is the ultimate test in such a pragmatic art. This
antithesis, real though it has often been, must not be
allowed to hamstring the zest of the metaphrastical
perfectionist. Communication must take place; the
nerves must sometimes tingle and the skin flush, as
with original poetry; but to bring this about, ‘with
poesy to open poesy’ as Chapman describes it in his
preface to the Iliad, is it necessary, is it inevitable that
the imagination should deal with its given material
highhandedly and inaccurately? Is there not here an
attitude of mind, an approach, to be cultivated, a
backward and elusive faculty to be encouraged: is there
not an art or science of translation, still in its crudest
stages, to be developed ? The present version of Beowulf,
for what it is worth, is offered as a step in the direction
of ‘full translation’; that is to say, it aims to interest and
at times to excite the reader of poetry without mis­
leading anyone who has no access to the original.
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It is just about a hundred years since Beowulf transla­
tions in modern English verse began to be produced,
and in that period more than a dozen such assaults have
been made on the poem. (A list of these versions will be
found on p. 94.) It may fairly be said, however, that
not one of these has succeeded in establishing itself as
a notable presentation, even for its own period, of a
great original. Beowulf has been unfortunate in having
had no Gavin Douglas, no George Chapman, no John
Dryden: the only poet to turn his hand to it has been
William Morris, and this translation is disastrously bad,
being uncouth to the point of weirdness, unfairly
inaccurate, and often more obscure than the original
(hardly, in fact, a translation at all, since Morris
‘worked up’ a prose paraphrase passed to him with
increasing misgiving by the scholarly A. J. Wyatt).
Nothing has been found, therefore, in these Beowulf
translations to interest either the practising poet or the
cultivated reader of poetry, unless his aim is simply to
find out what the poem deals with, and that would be
more safely and easily got from a prose version. It must
be remarked that the translators themselves are only
partly responsible for this state of affairs (less responsible
in the years up to 1920, more responsible thereafter),
since the problems of verse translation are at any period
one facet of the huge general problem of verse com­
position, and when the existing common tradition of
writing poetry, especially from the point of view
of technique and craftsmanship but also in choice of
subject, becomes as enervated and unworkmanlike as it
did in this country between the time of Garnett’s
translation in 1882 and Clark Hall’s in 1914, we can
hardly be surprised that the Beowulfs of the period have
an ineffectualness reflecting a wider decline. Nothing,
indeed, could be farther from the mood and effect
of Beowulf than the neomedievalism of Morris and
the Pre-Raphaelites, late Victorian romanticism, the
aestheticism of the Nineties, or the mild-mannered
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prettiness and sentiment of the pre-Georgian and
Georgian poets of 1900-14. The period was necessarily
at a loss, both in diction and in metre, when it
attempted to recapture Old English epic poetry, and
the most presentable of these eaaly versions, that of
Gummere (1909), can only be described as painstaking
and close to the text: it has no poetic life, and its
archaism would not now be tolerated. There is not the
same excuse, however, for translators who have con­
tinued to indulge and perpetuate this essentially late-
nineteenth-century undisciplined archaistic pseudo-
poetic style of Beowulf translation, after the first world
war and the changes in poetry which accompanied that
upheaval. The most noticeable fact about the post-1918
versions is that they fail to establish a contact with the
poetry of their time, and therefore fail to communicate,
except to those who have themselves no contact with
the living verse of their time. They show no awareness
of such lessons as were available and might have helped:
in Imagism with its insistence on care in the choice of
individual words, in the general rejection of literariness,
decoration, and the obsolete or bankrupt expression, in
the new situational and narrative realism which was
being experimented with in poets as different as Owen,
Rosenberg, Frost, Day Lewis, and Auden.
Consider diction. The general principle of translators
seems always to have been: use archaic diction to pre­
serve epic dignity. Even after the twentieth-century
rebellion against archaism (of words and of word-
order), this tiresome and usually thoughtless (and hence
often ludicrous) tone-raising device has continued to be
employed in Beowulf translation. It gives us in Scott
Moncrieff’s version* such grotesqueries as ‘their sarks
1 Sniped at even when it appeared in 19x1:
. . . another surly Scot—Moncrieff
Who brings the early Saxon songs to grief,
Who translates Beowulf, and then (oh epitaph!)
Has on the cover his own photograph . . .
(Augustine Riven, in Wbttlt 1911.)
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